[Freddy]

One of the first things that got me interested in AI was swarm intelligence.

A long time back on some TV show I saw an animation of some programmed birds flocking and navigating their way around obstacles. It was a simple 3D environment with wire-frame birds and towers. I can't find anything similar on YouTube at the moment.

We touched on emergent self awareness in another thread and it's hard to grasp. Emergent intelligence might be easier to think about because it can be observed more directly - at least for me !

The simplified premise, the way I see it, is you can have one unit that is fairly predictable. But when there are more of the same unit, the way they interact shows an emergent group intelligence. This can be seen in nature in quite spectacular ways, such as murmurations - we see Starlings doing this in the UK...



If you had spent years observing a single bird, would you have any idea that they are capable of that ?

This is like the saying "More than the sum of it's parts". No individual bird knows what the enlarged group is doing, but slight adjustments made by one have a dramatic effect on the whole.

Wikipedia has a page here : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_intelligence

[kei10]

Swarm Intelligence is driven by things that we can't possibly see in the naked eye. The physics and turbulence of the air, for example, and chemicals that traverse around us without us even aware of it.

Take the example of the entire world with internet connection. Post a news about something weird, almost the whole world goes chaotic.

The internet connection is one of the example of the catalyst.

 

[Freddy]

Hmm, yes, like the butterfly effect and chain reactions.